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Declan's tribute

If you had asked me a little over a year ago if my twin brother would be capable of ending his life, my answer would have been: “Not a chance”.

How wrong could I have been?

You see, to those who knew him, Conor was everything we wanted to be. He was never without a smile and rarely had a bad word to say (unless you were having a go about his beloved Celtic).

He never lived with “what if”. He just did. That was something I looked up to.

He was the life and soul of a party, an amazing goalkeeper and not short of admirers.

Over the last year, I have tried to find a conclusion, a turning point. I tried to search for answers to give me and my family peace of mind, because we have been destroyed.

Why did our boy not want to be here? What did we miss? Could we have changed things? I could go on forever about the questions that run through our minds as we lie in bed at night and struggle through the days ahead.

It wasn’t just Conor’s life that ended that morning – a part of our own left with him.

I think of my mum and dad, as they wake up each day, parents of three children, except they don’t get to have three children there anymore. Again, why?

The questions are never ending and the one person who can answer those questions can’t.

Life has to go on, but it has opened my eyes to bigger questions that maybe we can answer.

Why is there no obvious help for people who may be suffering in silence? And what can we as a society do to open our minds, our hearts and read between the lines?

If someone is diagnosed with a physical illness, doctors work round the clock to save their lives. When emergency treatment is necessary, society steps up to raise funds, offer support and fight for life alongside them.

But what about people who are fighting that illness inside their minds? What do we do for them?

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The answer is no. An average person has to wait around six months to see a counsellor.

Do we ask physical illness to wait six months until we are ready to treat it? No, because those six months can truly be a matter of life and death. So why do we force a person with a disease of the mind to wait that long?

Health services need to see that this, too, is a matter of life and death. I know this is a lot to do with funding, but we can try to change that.

We can raise these concerns with our Government, raise awareness and force changes to be implemented.

Most suicides are male Why? It’s because as a society, we have forced men to be “men”.

Men don’t have any need to be sad or low, because that makes you less of a man. So they keep up the front. They keep on being the man society wants them to be, to be like Conor was.

We only push those feelings further down inside and let them get darker and darker until there is no other escape. How sad is that? It needs to change.

We need to judge less and support more. Maybe if those struggling can see us fighting for them, it may spur them to want to fight for themselves.

We need to show anyone suffering in silence that we are here, we’ve got you, you’re not alone. You are worth it.

Maybe I’ve just answered some of those questions that seem unanswered. We will never know. But if Conor’s life could leave any imprint in the world.

I want it to be that people realise the importance of asking the questions – “Are you OK? Because it’s OK if you’re not.”

We always say when someone passes away, that we will hug our loved ones tighter. Do that. Break the stigma, let’s talk about it. We are all in this together.